Syrian Refugee Crisis Tests British Compassion

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Migrants at a site dubbed the Jungle in Calais, France, where some 3,000 people have set up camp — most seeking desperately to get to Britain.CreditCreditPhilippe Huguen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

CRACKINGTON HAVEN, England — The Atlantic Ocean pounds a shingled beach below massive cliffs that resemble some great fortress. But even here, in this remote cranny of Cornwall in southwest England, intimations of a distant tumult prise their way through the ramparts.

“We CAN make a difference,” proclaims a flier in the window of the Cabin Café, promoting a cake sale in the village hall to gather cash, along with bluejeans, shoes, tents, socks, belts, sleeping bags, woolly hats, pots and pans and other items to ease the plight of Syrian refugees.

In fact, the refugees will most likely make a much bigger difference on a wider stage, sharpening an issue that has been brewing for months: As migrants press for sanctuary in the European Union, will the images of their often chaotic arrival persuade Britons to pull further away, even voting to leave the bloc in a referendum to be held no later than 2017?

It is a question that has arisen from Britain’s handling of the crisis, during which Prime Minister David Cameron has refused to participate in a European Union plan to distribute refugees, particularly those from Syria, by quota.

The calculation is apparently that resentment of unwanted immigrants has reached such toxic levels in this country that it has come to represent the greatest of political risks. But as the cake sale seemed to show, there is what The Financial Times called “a compassionate and humane streak in the British people that ought not to be underestimated.”

“It was fantastic,” said Janey Comber, the organizer of the sale on Sept. 19, cataloging donations of 650 pounds, around $1,000, and enough jeans, sweaters, tents and backpacks to fill a van, now destined for migrants gathered at Calais, just across the English Channel, and living in a ramshackle settlement known as the Jungle.

Perhaps, a reporter suggested, the generosity was a way of avoiding having Syrian families come to stay in Cornish homes. Not at all, Ms. Comber said.

“There are lots of people who volunteered to take in a Syrian family,” she said. “We are a wealthy country. No one is going to fall off the edge because of another Syrian family.”

That sentiment, though, is not universal. Compassion has its limits in a land conflicted over its historic self-image as a sanctuary.

Even Ms. Comber, a former county councilor for the small Liberal Democrat party, acknowledged that, in discussing the Syrian migrants, “you get the odd remark about not knowing whether they are from ISIS,” a reference to the Islamic State.

Long before this summer’s mass migration, moreover, Britons had begun to chafe at Mr. Cameron’s failure to redeem a promise to significantly curb the number of foreigners arriving in Britain. Indeed, official figures in August showed net immigration hit a record 330,000 in the year to March 2015.

There are those who argue that substantial numbers of Britons do not wish to take in any Syrian migrants at all and that the outcome of the referendum on membership of the European Union is becoming increasingly unpredictable.

For Britain’s leaders, that conflation of immigration concerns and a British departure from the European Union could well be the most worrisome byproduct of the migrant crisis at a time when Mr. Cameron is seeking to renegotiate the terms of his country’s membership in the bloc.

“If it becomes widely understood that Mr. Cameron has, unwittingly with his referendum, given voters a chance to reset immigration policy,” the columnist Iain Martin wrote in The Daily Telegraph, the campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union “could be in a great deal of trouble.”

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